It's always a little disconcerting when you are able to turn a band into an SAT analogy question without having to sit down and listen to their record first. Take for instance Jamaica, a retro-obsessed Parisian duo with a thing for unabashed pop anthems, who recently broadened their commercial appeal Stateside by having their single featured in a car ad. So yes, it's safe to say that Jamaica have a great deal in common with Phoenix, and their debut No Problem does its best to try and capture the star-making magic that those other French pop luminaries uncovered with their last LP, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. The differences between the two records, however, is more important: No Problem is a debut in the most uninformed sense of the word, showcasing mostly bland, same-sounding songs in serious need of some personality or spark.

The duo (Antoine Hilaire and Florent Lyonnet) enlisted Justice's Xavier de Rosnay and Daft Punk's sound engineer Peter Franco to handle production duties, and on the single "I Think I Like U 2", it seems like the big-name help came in handy. It's a song that's a little cheesy and way too excited, but in the way that really sharp, fun pop music can be without feeling too patronizing or dopey. As familiar sounding as it is (even the lyrics-- "She was never pretty, she was only young"-- feel like stolen goods), it works, plain and simple. If we give Jamaica the benefit of the doubt, everything else on No Problem is then, in some way, cut from the cloth of "I Think I Like U 2", and it's a sensible, if not unambitious, plan of attack. But not a single one of the resulting songs captures the same kind of ebullience and fluidity, instead opting for choppier structures that, in most cases, seem bent on keeping people off the discotheque floor.

You can hear bits of de Rosnay and Franco here and there-- those mile-long, metallic KISS riffs that Justice are so fond of appear on "Secrets", especially-- but the songwriting here is so pat, and the songs themselves are often indistinguishable from one another. Most of the production tricks even feel wafer-thin and can't save material this bone-dry. The swaggering cock-rock tribute ("By the Numbers"), the half-hearted Elton John Xerox ("She's Gonna"), the numerous blown-off choruses, all these problems can't overshadow the simple fact that as these songs become so increasingly repetitive, their derivative qualities are mere footnotes.